Independent voters and women favored Michael Bennet in his U.S. Senate race against Ken Buck, according to preliminary exit poll data.

Exit polls of voters conducted for the major television networks and the Associated Press by the firm Edison Research show Bennet, the Democratic incumbent senator, holding decisive edges over Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck, a Republican, in those two key categories.

He led Buck with female voters, 56 percent to 40 percent, according to the polls, and he trailed Buck with male voters by 43 percent to 54 percent.

"If Bennet can win with independents, that would counter the national trend and perhaps be enough to get him over the top," local political analyst Eric Sondermann wrote via e-mail Tuesday evening.

Bennet also did better among Republicans than Buck did among Democrats in the polls. Both of the data points could have helped to blunt a Republican turnout advantage that saw nearly 79,000 GOP ballots cast over Democratic ones. But John Straayer, a Colorado State University political science professor, said the abiding closeness of the race overall showed the strength of the Republican wave.

"From Bennet's standpoint, if you can do better with the opposition than the opposition did with you and you can do better with unaffiliated voters, you should be in good shape," Straayer said.

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The exit polls were conducted Tuesday morning with about 1,000 voters and are not conclusive figures. But they provided the first tentative account of what motivated voters to cast their ballots and for whom. Pre-election polls had often muddied the picture.

In the governor's race, the exit polls showed Colorado voters favoring Democrat John Hickenlooper almost across the board. He was beating Republican Dan Maes and American Constitution Party candidate Tom Tancredo with both genders and nearly all age, race and income groups in the polls. He won 95 percent of Democrats, 51 percent of independents and even 12 percent of Republicans, according to the exit polls.

Straayer said the results likely reflect voters' concerns that Maes and Tancredo are too extreme as much as they do an embrace of Hickenlooper.

"Businessman, non-businessman, old, young, it doesn't matter," Straayer said. "There's a point at which I think people come to the realization that whether you like small government or not, you have to have government."